Freelance journalist and Independent political activist, open to offers in both capacities. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Accepts PayPal.

Friday, 27 July 2018

Party Over Here?

After more than 20 years, they can no longer be bothered to pretend that they ever did not belong in the same party. So they are preparing to set it up. So, what would this new "centrist" party look like? Like the Coalition, that's what.

Socially liberal in the "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" sense, but heavily committed to Tony Blair's assaults on civil liberties, and to his persecution of the poor, the sick and the disabled by such means as the Bedroom Tax. Pro-EU and pro-austerity, which is just the way the EU likes it. And signed up to the bombing into oblivion of wherever came into the heads of the Bush and Clinton courts in exile.

The Conservative activist base is like that, such as there still is. I get in trouble for saying so, but it is obviously true, which is why it annoys people when I point it out. As for its MPs, they are practically all like that, but why leave a party that had, after all, been led by the Prime Minister for the last eight years and counting?

Much of the Labour activist base used to be like that, back when there were only three men and a dog in the post-Iraq, pre-Corbyn Labour Party. But that is no longer the case. And the Lib Dems opposed the Iraq War and Blair's attacks on civil liberties, before being annihilated because they went into government with the Conservatives, so they will be giving both the Blues and the Pale Pinks a very wide berth.

All in all, then, a party of failed Labour MPs in search of Conservative activists who already have a party that can reasonably claim to be doing, if not brilliantly, then at least all right in a weak field, on the programme that this new party has to pretend is not already being offered by anyone else.

I do not think that many of them ever are going to leave the Labour Party. They intend to stay and make Jeremy Corbyn's life miserable. But there is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.